F#%k Yeah It's Persuasive, &%$#@!'s

The January issue of Inside Influence, had an interesting article by Noah Goldstein, Ph.D.

Social psychologists Cory Scherer and Brad Sagarin hypothesized that when people pepper their speech with an occasional obscenity, the audience perceives an increase in the speaker’s intensity, perceived passion and enthusiasm. Ultimately, it makes the speech more persuasive.

So did it?

To test this idea, Scherer and Sagarin had participants watch a video of a five-minute long persuasive speech. For half of the participants, the speaker used the relatively tame swear phrase “Damn it!” once during the speech. For the other half of participants, the speech was exactly the same, except the swear phrase was omitted. Once the speech was over, participants were asked about their attitudes toward the topic addressed in the speech. Consistent with predictions, the data revealed not only that the speaker was viewed as more passionate about the topic when profanity was used than when it was not, but also that the former was more persuasive than the latter.

Hell yeah it did.

Science of Asses in Seats

Now that NYTIMES.com has opened the doors to it's archives, I'm rummaging through it for shiggles.

I came across "The 150-Second Sell, Take 34" -- a great article about the science and art behind movie trailers. There are some good quotes about the needs to NOT connect all the dots for the audience.

But as films evolved, their marketing changed. Explicit hype pulled a Garbo and gave way to subtler hype. The man responsible for this shift was Stephen O. Frankfurt, the Young & Rubicam ad executive who brought America the Lay's potato chips slogan ''Betcha can't eat just one.'' In 1968, Paramount hired Frankfurt to come up with a trailer for ''Rosemary's Baby.'' Violating Hollywood's marketing rules, Frankfurt ignored the plot in favor of something starkly evocative -- an image of a baby carriage in silhouette, the grating sound of an infant crying and a cryptic tag line: ''Pray for Rosemary's baby.'' The movie was a huge hit, and the campaign became an industry benchmark.

Frankfurt, who is now 70, holds fast against unveiling a film's full storyline. ''Trailers today give it all away,'' he says. ''If the thing tells you too much, it eliminates your involvement, which is the first step to persuasion.''